Lonesome Blue is out now!
Image: Supplied.
Jeremy Strother and Bobbie L Stamper have unveiled the debut EP from their collaborative project, Racing Birds. To celebrate the release, the duo are taking MILKY through Lonesome Blue, track by track!
The first song we wrote for The EP was Vampires & LSD. It’s a story about two lovers on the run, good at being bad. It’s Midwestern motels & desert highways. ‘She likes old cars & graveyards, distorted guitars . . . but I want you all to myself, start a family, made of vampires & LSD.’ The way it came together gave us a really clear vision of how we wanted the EP to feel and sound; the lyrics, the screams, the guitars, the rhythm and the colors. It was new territory for Bob and me. I think if we hadn’t written that song, and if it hadn’t come out the way it did, Racing Birds would probably not have become a band. So we started with ‘Vampires,’ which set the tone, then I think it was Rarely Never Loaded’ At that point we knew how to grab hold of the moment, we wrote Silver Sun Bohemian, which definitely leans into the southern California mystique - fading tail lights, 70’s sunsets." shares Strother.
SILVER SUN BOHEMIAN
We spent ages building up the production. I remember it was pretty big at one point. And it just wasn’t feeling like “us.” It’s happened like that a few times, where a song gets bigger than itself and we have to strip it back. In the end we left just Bob’s guitar and the vocal, so it all has heaps of space around it. When we got to the chorus lyrics, it started to feel like a Racing Birds song. “I need somebody to trust, someone to kick up the dust, I need somebody to reach, someone to haunt all my dreams.”
VAMPIRES & LSD
It took a few goes to figure out how Vampires was meant to sound. I think the first few times we tried to record it, we were approaching it too gently. I wasn’t laying into the vocals hard enough. I remember going to Bob’s to try and sing it one last time. I had a cold and was dosed up on cold and flu medicine, but I was still pretty blocked up. I sang it a few times, tried to hit it pretty hard and then went home. I didn’t think much of it. Bob sent me the song the next day and he’d built the guitars and the track around what I’d sung and that was it. Finished.
RARELY NEVER LOADED
I had an idea and a pretty good sketch for the verses on this one, but when we got it into the studio (garage) it started to take shape. We added the rock and roll elements, the stomps and claps, and sped it up a bit. The guitar riff came to Bob after a few goes, and we sort of built the track around that. It’s just a descending line over two chords, but it sets the tone and adds a blues element that we like.
LONESOME BLUE
It’s basically an old R&B song. It’s pretty, slow, and in 6/8 time like those great Otis Redding songs. They work because there’s a real pain to it. So we knew that for it to work and be compelling we had to really perform it, lay into it and go big. The vocals in the chorus are pushed really hard, and the guitar solo Bob does has that same vibe. We had to feel our way through it. I lost my voice after that one, and Bob wrecked his hands pretty bad.
Lonesome Blue is out now!